Technology and Culture

It was a surreal experience seeing Billy Elliot the day I learned of David Noble’s unexpected and untimely passing. That evening, the popular musical’s commodification of working-class life struck the wrong note. Adapted from the 2000 film by screenwriter Lee Hall, with uplifting music composed by Elton John, Billy Elliot tells the story of a young working-class boy in a coal-mining community in northern England who has unusual talent for ballet dancing—to the mortification of his father and older brother. Billy’s personal journey to achieve artistic fulfillment plays out against the backdrop of the 1984–85 coal-miners’ strike, an epic twelve-month battle in which Margaret Thatcher’s government crushed the dying embers of old-labor militancy. Pitched street battles are conveniently offstage in the musical, while onstage the striking miners and the strike-breaking policemen have a lively ensemble dance. In a “consolatory fantasy of personal escape,” Billy successfully makes it to the Royal Ballet School in London, even while it is made clear that the loss of the strike means that it is curtain time for the miners. They intone, with evident resignation: “The ground is empty, and cold as hell / But we all go together when we go.”¹ [End Page 360]

David Noble described himself as a scholar, a journalist, and an activist. For him, history was authentic and contested, and the miners’ strike was (sorry to put it this way) nothing to be dancing about. Across more than three decades, he published seven major books of which America by Design (1977) and Forces of Production (1984) are likely the best known to readers of this journal. His corpus of scholarly work and activism had an underlying logic and overall direction. With these two books he made a critical and historical appraisal of technology from a Marxist perspective. His subsequent critique of the Western ideology of progress, which he traced back to the religious inspirations and impulses behind Western science and technology, appeared in A World Without Women (1992), The Religion of Technology (1997), and Beyond the Promised Land (2005). A series of polemical essays found their way into Digital Diploma Mills (2001), which targeted computer-driven online education, while Progress Without People (1993, 1995) brought together his activist-journalism and congressional testimony on the social effects of machine-tool automation.²

A native of New York City, David Franklin Noble grew up in Miami, attended the University of Florida (majoring in chemistry and history), then moved north to the University of Rochester to earn his Ph.D. with Christopher Lasch, the notable historian and prominent social critic. Of Lasch, one of his students noted: “I do not think any other historian of his generation moved as forcefully into the public arena.” Knopf had published Lasch’s two books on the radical tradition in American politics (1965 (1969), which not only chronicled the intellectual antecedents of the New Left, but sought to shape that movement, as well as a volume of essays that appeared after he joined the University of Rochester’s history department in 1970. In 1977 Lasch published Haven in a Heartless World, on the family in capitalist society; and two years later his quirky Culture of Narcissism hit the best-seller lists. Lasch, according to one reviewer, “insists on the integrity . . . of the intellect as a guide through the swamps of feeling.” I believe that David Noble shared this sentiment. Among the other notable graduate students at Rochester—working with Lasch, Eugene Genovese, and, for a time, Herbert Gutman—were Leon Fink, Russell Jacoby, Bruce Levine, Maurice Isserman, and William Leach.³ Noble’s dissertation, completed in [End Page 361] 1974, was titled “Science and Technology in the Corporate Search for Order: American Engineers and Social Reform, 1900–1929.”

Published just three years later as America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism, Noble’s first book, with a foreword by Lasch, was published by Knopf to unusually prominent reviews.⁴ Robert Heilbroner in the New York Review of Books wrote that Noble “makes us see technology as...